Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer: Binary Opposition in Historical Interpretations of Gender

Critique of Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology (1975)

One of the most notable lines from Sally Slocum’s “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology” was as follows: “The basic of any discipline is not the answers it gets, but the questions it asks” (313).  She dove deeper into the nature of forming questions and asserted, “our questions are shaped by the particulars of our historical situation, and by unconscious cultural assumptions” (307). Here, Slocum made the assumption that we as human beings are unconsciously shaped by history and the driving ideologies of the culture. In essence, she created a clear link between history, or specifically in this case, patriarchy, and “unconscious cultural assumptions.” It is even slightly unclear who or what she refers to by “our.” Those it seems that she was accusing the academic discipline of anthropology, she was also accusing the very nature of human beings as focused and shaped only on one particular framework and mindset of scholarship: man as the hunter.

Her argument is, essentially, driven around how men have manipulated historical data and information to support the “men as a hunter” argument. Using an example such as an increase in brain size, she argued that the act of gathering resulted in a rapid increase in brain size as well. Slocum essentially used the women as a gatherer argument and specifically the argument that the oldest form of incest prohibition is between that of mother and son in order to reconstruct primitive social structure. Through the use of the woman as a gatherer argument, she attempted to recreate how gathering was perceived. She argued for how gathering was both difficult and demanding and even implied how our molded perceptions of masculinity and feminity and the designated roles from these perceptions made it difficult to view gathering as a difficult and demanding activity.

As Slocum constantly mentioned that the questions drive the nature of knowledge, I believe that there are some questions that she did not ask that should have been asked. It seemed that her argument created a binary opposition; she created two separate gender-based roles for the human through primarily archaeological and behavioral analysis. Such a binary opposition limited the nature of knowledge in that this dual gender divide created two specific categories and failed to account for individuals who did not fit into these categories (assuming such deviants existed at all). Therefore, the examination of men who gathered and women who may provide large insight into how such a development of male and female role split even came about. Slocum’s analysis as well as her criticism of the field made me feel as if sometimes, the discipline of anthropology in respects to gender-based problems focuses more-so on justifying or disputing the gender divide rather than looking for the forces, processes and mechanisms (essentially, the causes) that created such a divide in the first place.

L